Are there any Mistweaver theorycrafters left?

[iDrunkenheal]

Ignoring his insults and replying to his post for the sake of conversation for the rest of us,



Whoops, was looking at out-of-stance. Whatever.



You guys can laugh at me all you want but it's enabling me to do tons of healing for my raid team in particular. Perhaps those in stronger guilds with stronger co-healers can drop Spirit and let them carry the single-target and quickly heal people who drop down, so that the Mistweaver can do more raw HPS. But that doesn't justify telling the entire MW community including people like me with a couple heroics down in a 10-man or people doing Normal Modes to drop all their Spirit without looking at their raid comp and the people they're playing with.

Just 'cause everyone's doing something doesn't make it correct, either. Bandwagon Effect is not a counter-argument. Further, most people are sheep (well to be fair, just don't know their class that well and aren't that versed in mathematics) and do what theorycrafters tell 'em they should do to maximize their potential. So if there's a couple people who started a trend, especially with Mistweaver Monk since the community is pretty small, that doesn't mean everyone should follow, specifically people in John Doe guilds like mine.

It may be interesting to consider this fact that I'm getting at: that perhaps this no-Spirit build only works (or at least work best) when the rest of your raid team is playing close to flawlessly. Taking the example of Heroic Horridon since it's fresh in my mind: Ideally, that raid member shouldn't have gotten hit by that tick of Sand Trap. Practically, though, you need the mana to Surge them since you're 2-healing a 10-man, or it's a wipe. Ideally, the adds should go down super fast and have everything interrupted. Practically, something will get missed and you need to Surge someone who just took two Fireballs before this Dire Call or another Fireball/Chain Lightning. Getting more Spirit allows you to carry more.

I also like the controlled burst of using the Spirit for Surging Mist for guaranteed, fast chi generation, as opposed to crit affecting your overall throughput. It doesn't take much Spirit to have enough mana for those times, though. I'm more talking about covering others' mistakes.

Am I making sense?

As someone who's raided both 10 and 25 both tiers. Higher spirit builds are justifiable in 10 man if your co-healer refuses to spot heal. I know I had this problem in our 10 man (us rank 15th through most of the tier). In 25 its all about pushing hps. I've seen some really good 25 healers fail horribly in 10 man because they don't understand that in 10 man you don't have 3-5 other healers that can quickly grab that person that took extra damage. Tank healing in 10 man is also more important for a monk (esp on horridon).

Don't worry too much about totaltotemic he's a below average monk who thinks he has all the answers.

@Reglitch should he be fistweaving on horridon? probably. does his raid not only know that they should be within 20 yards of him or his statue in order for fistweaving to be viable? probably not.

Just try to tell your raid to position themselves near the boss at all times on the 2nd door and on. Constantly remind them that it will be a huge benefit to you and the raid if they do.

[TheTrueM4gg0t]

On your example for horridon, you should be using fistweaving to cover spot healing though because he takes increased damage.

yes but the principles he mentions still apply. The part about Spirit I mean. From the day you kill a boss the 3rd time, you will not need any spirit anymore for him. The only time it matters, and when it can actually happen that you oom is on progression. I've oomed a lot, especially on Horridon. It was defently not my fault (bad fight execution) but still the bit more mana can help a little.
You're fine with a bit of spirit on gear for 10s.
I personally have 9k, which is above average. (allread bought the heal-cloak for 5.4, no point in taking DPS cloak for a little more HPS when content is clear anyway^^) I never go oom these days, I could do with less. (could change from haste+crit > spirit > mastery to haste+crit > mastery > spirit, but I don't want to, I just severly dislike our mastery)
But for you during progression, a bit of spirit is fine, especially for 10s. Don't let some random thinks-hes-so-elite guy discourage you. It's always good to try stuff out yourself. Try going with less spirit, and if you don't like it, pump it up again

[Totaltotemic]

It may be interesting to consider this fact that I'm getting at: that perhaps this no-Spirit build only works (or at least work best) when the rest of your raid team is playing close to flawlessly. Taking the example of Heroic Horridon since it's fresh in my mind: Ideally, that raid member shouldn't have gotten hit by that tick of Sand Trap. Practically, though, you need the mana to Surge them since you're 2-healing a 10-man, or it's a wipe. Ideally, the adds should go down super fast and have everything interrupted. Practically, something will get missed and you need to Surge someone who just took two Fireballs before this Dire Call or another Fireball/Chain Lightning. Getting more Spirit allows you to carry more.

Everything else aside, you've made a very important point in that theorycrafting completely breaks down in the healing world if your fellow healer(s) isn't doing what their theorycrafting says they should be able to do (which, incidentally, is why I think 10 man experience that is anything behind the bleeding edge is somewhat unhelpful in theorycrafting discussions, having a 10 man raid with an even close to ideal healing setup is practically impossible, you kind of have to wing it based on the class and skill of your partner if 2 healing). Theorycrafting is just that, theory. It doesn't apply in a situation where the basic assumptions being made (your strat makes sense, people are avoiding unnecessary damage, you're not doing some silly healing comp like Druid/Monk where one party is forced into tank healing) are wrong.

When I'm talking about the Mistweaver spec, I don't even go into the realm of thought concerning how to fix things when an unexpected problem arises, that's entirely in the realm of skill, not theory. I don't critique armories and logs or talk about balance in the scope of "what if all of the other healers are awful and can't cover what they need to?" or "what if your raid just can't stop standing in stuff?" because it's frankly not a Mistweaver problem. When I dismiss the opinions of a 10 man raider whose most recent progression memory is of Horridon (the biggest "oh shit something went wrong" fight since Ascendant Council in T11), it's not about the person in question but a comment on just how skewed their perception is because they're forced to work in an awful environment for healing and thus not really applicable to a general theorycrafting discussion. It's the same over in the Revival nerf thread where the theorycrafters all say that Revival isn't even as good as Tranq on live but other raiders cite things like Lightning Storm on Jin'rokh as the instant part being necessary because their Druid is too bad to SWG Tranq when that really shouldn't be factored into the discussion.

When I commented on your armory and what I thought looked wrong on there, I would have completely dropped the discussion if I saw a response along the lines of "I have to bend the rules because my raid is weird and doesn't always work how it should" because that would have been acceptable to me as my critiques only apply to a somewhat ideal situation. What appeared to be later insults about theorycrafting knowledge was just frustration that you don't get to work in an environment where you get to min/max and thus haven't really looked into that kind of thing. If I'm harsh it's only because I care about making sure that Monks I encounter know what they're doing because it bothers me when I see things like my rival guild having to carry a Mistweaver because he has no clue what he's doing, and I know that's a burden on the 2-3 healers in that guild that are actually good. I apologize if I sometimes can't tell the difference between someone that truly is clueless and someone that just works with a different set of rules than I do and that I get visibly annoyed when I do.




Also a point of clarification on RPPM trinkets, I forgot that only Roro and UVLS have increased proc chances because their procs have static values, the value of HLG does up in ilvl because the actual proc is larger, which is magnified by the weird stacking thing it does. I'm far from perfect, but I'm trying.

[Lumiair]

I definitely agree with having a little more Spirit for 10's. It isn't my cup of tea (see what I did there? bahaha forgive me,) but if it works for you, then it makes no difference. Not everyone in the raid is going to be 100% on the ball while progressing and you end up needing to compensate for such. A few extra Surgings could be the difference between a kill and a wipe. Hell, Sand Trap is STILL a killer in our raids >.> months later.
Don't just blindly follow what top end players are doing I'd say, they've got strats down to a tee, and Min/Maxing tends to get the job done for them.

[Geodew]

Thanks for the encouragement. We actually had a wipe where we accidentally lusted before the pull such that we had 3 sec of lust left on-pull, and then that attempt we got horridon to 2%. Facepalm.

I did fistweave a lot and used a lot of my smaller cooldowns this past raid night. With fistweaving though it's hard to tell if the heals are actually going to the person who needs it or if it's just overhealing someone who's at 100%, since I'm not directing the healing myself. Any add-ons you guys use to tell you where the healing is going? I wonder if I should set up my Vuhdo's cluster finder to show people within 20yd of me... but that doesn't mean they're not near my statue.

With random Fireball/Chain Lightning damage and the raid spreading on door 4 (which I scolded them for, I have no idea why everyone runs away from the adds all over the place) I have people going out of range period (40yd+), and ReM not on people who need the heals. It's a mess, since people who are low need to be healed up in case they take another hit. That's where I'm tossing out a lot of Surgings, I think. My mana is pretty good (above 200k) until door 4 and then with CJL on direhorn and keeping tanks and the raid up during jalak phase I lose a ton of mana there. It leaves me with like 80k left for the ~2 minutes we spend bringing down Horridon, which feels like not very much considering tanks drop fast and need to be healed fast. For that part I grab Muscle Memory, knock direhorn away until tank isn't topped off, then Palm Horridon. Statue of course right in front of Horridon. Works pretty well except for not having much mana or if they take a really strong spike. I think they weren't saving enough cooldowns and will try to do better in future attempts though.

[Lumiair]

Just my two cents but I personally don't FW on Horridon to this day. Absolutely hate this fight with a passion so I purely MW. Plus, keeping everyone in range of your statue while they're moving out of sands, poison, totems, etc. is much easier said than done. I don't know if you have a Weak Aura set up for Dire Call, but that thing is my absolute favorite for this fight. Would definitely advise anyone progressing on him to have it. It's certainly draining having to cast CJL again and again and again to keep the direhorn away, and FW tends to add to the drain. Zuen is my hero for that add as long as I face him so Zuen knocks it clear to the other side of the arena.

[Geodew]

Weak Aura set up for Dire Call

Brilliant idea. But... how on earth? WA can access boss ability cooldowns? Lol. I haven't messed with it much (I got it pretty much just for Lucidity), but I'm a fast learner. Any quick tips for setting one up?

[Lumiair]

Reglitch actually posted them all here http://http://www.mmo-champion.com/t...ter-Weak-Auras
Took a second to find the post. It's really just a WA timer that goes "it's been such and such amount of time, and Horridon Dire Calls at this given time, so use TFT now." This is of course a little screwy at times where he's supposed to do his call but is being rammed into the gate. I really only have trouble with it towards the 4th door in terms of being on time or not. Either way it's been a life saver. Plus there's auras for the other fights that require this kind of thing.

[Geodew]

Reglitch actually posted them all here http://http://www.mmo-champion.com/t...ter-Weak-Auras
Took a second to find the post. It's really just a WA timer that goes "it's been such and such amount of time, and Horridon Dire Calls at this given time, so use TFT now." This is of course a little screwy at times where he's supposed to do his call but is being rammed into the gate. I really only have trouble with it towards the 4th door in terms of being on time or not. Either way it's been a life saver. Plus there's auras for the other fights that require this kind of thing.

Code even easier; thanks. After watching the timers for so many attempts I know what you're talking about for the third-to-fourth door Dire Call. There's a point at which if you do it 10s before cd he just rams the 3rd door and the TFT ReMs fall off before the Call. To handle that, I basically assume someone's gunna grab the orb. If they don't, I heal through it, no big deal since we're cleaning up adds that are almost dead anyway. But if he does it later when we're starting the fourth door I figure that's a little more deadly. So I save it just in case to mitigate the worse of the two possible situations. :P

[Lumiair]

Mhm, I'm right there with ya. Probably for the better though, keeps us on our toes!

[TheTrueM4gg0t]

for the last phase you shouldn't need to much mana anymore.
That's about the only place in ToT where you can stop spamming ReM. There's no AoE dmg in between Dire Calls, so you have enough time to heal it up. Just put ReMs on the group befor Dire Call comes in, and after the people are topped, you can save the mana and not use it until the next Dire Call is comming up.
The only thing to manage here is the tank damage. There's no point (in terms of healing) to Jab->TP spamm horridon. Spare the mana. Just Jab, then wait until tank takes dmg so you can instantly heal him with TP. Oh and spamm Healing Spheres on the tank as soon as Dire Call is comming. Eminence is not guaranteed to heal the tank, you'll want to take care of that manually. Only continue to Fistweave when people are at full health again. You only want to fistweave when you know the tank will get the heals. The tank is really the only source of wipes in that phase, so do everything you can to keep him alive (Healing Spheres whenever possible!)

When you cast CJL on your Direhorn, only cast it an interupt it fast. you don't want mana to go to waste on the add. I don't know if it's worth it to cast Provoke, because the Dino also gets the 50% increased speed buff, so allthough you kicked it back a few yards, it'll be walking towards you faster... To be sure I only used CJL. I'm afraid Chi Wave wont kick it back :-(

[iDrunkenheal]

for the last phase you shouldn't need to much mana anymore.
That's about the only place in ToT where you can stop spamming ReM. There's no AoE dmg in between Dire Calls, so you have enough time to heal it up. Just put ReMs on the group befor Dire Call comes in, and after the people are topped, you can save the mana and not use it until the next Dire Call is comming up.
The only thing to manage here is the tank damage. There's no point (in terms of healing) to Jab->TP spamm horridon. Spare the mana. Just Jab, then wait until tank takes dmg so you can instantly heal him with TP. Oh and spamm Healing Spheres on the tank as soon as Dire Call is comming. Eminence is not guaranteed to heal the tank, you'll want to take care of that manually. Only continue to Fistweave when people are at full health again. You only want to fistweave when you know the tank will get the heals. The tank is really the only source of wipes in that phase, so do everything you can to keep him alive (Healing Spheres whenever possible!)

When you cast CJL on your Direhorn, only cast it an interupt it fast. you don't want mana to go to waste on the add. I don't know if it's worth it to cast Provoke, because the Dino also gets the 50% increased speed buff, so allthough you kicked it back a few yards, it'll be walking towards you faster... To be sure I only used CJL. I'm afraid Chi Wave wont kick it back :-(

chi wave knocks it back. I don't think provoke causes it to move faster since its immune to movement speed buffs / debuffs and I used to run xuen and put it on the add when wargod was out since its the most healing intensive phase. You can disarm wargod which helps a lot (theres a direcall that lines us with his shout disarm before it and revival after). After wargod is dead tanks need to be 100% topped off all the time. He melees for around 500k+.

[Densalo]

It's probably worth noting, as I haven't seen it in here yet, that the healing meta has a huge impact on the amount of spirit necessary.
Having done both 25man and 10man raiding, tank spot healing and the use of EM etc. IS much more prevalent in 10man. However, with the meta, I still find it worthwhile to reforge everything to crit rather than spirit for our current progression (3/13 atm, new group) and have 0 mana issues as a result.
This will depend HEAVILY on the skill of the individual Mistweaver, which, in my opinion, is why it is so heatedly debated.

This brings me to my second and more interesting point. Has anyone looked into how much the meta raises the inherent value of crit? IDK about other MW's out there but if I get a meta proc with no heals necessary, I spam chi generators (usually SoM + SM) for free chi which I can then blow on Tea stacks. To those before stating that crit to mana was always a net loss: that completely changes when the spell that crit was free in the first place. Just a thought.

While I am not 13/13, I have been playing a MW monk since the day MoP was released, and have healed every tier thus far. Hopefully that accounts for something here.
My opinion:
No meta: 9-10k spirit was fine
With meta: as little spirit as possible with excellent skill and tea useage. Spirit becomes mostly a helpful substitute and allows you forgiveness in your play, but idealy, would be spent on throughput.

[Geodew]

To rephrase, you're kind of saying "You have mana problems because you're bad," which is both insulting and probably not correct. I *do* have a couple top-150 WoL rankings (or at least had) so I'm positive I'm not awful. I'll assume you tl;dr'd your way through the essays I wrote, but basically I think we decided we think it's more that I'm carrying my guild a little bit. I guess my co-healers aren't spot-healing quickly enough, and DPS organization is less than ideal, especially for interrupt fights. I was basically suggesting that "drop all Spirit" is not always good advice.

Having said that, I also said earlier that H Horridon and Tank-healing H Tortos are the only times I've had mana issues recently. I'm sure I could have dropped all Spirit entirely down to about 7k for Heroic Ji-kun. I was beginning the burn phase with 250k+ mana left and spent the last 40 seconds or so surging the crap out of everyone while we burned the boss.

I set up a Weak Aura for Lucidity. It's not THAT hard to take advantage of to either get full chi with SooM+SM or Jab-TP-Jab while it's up then TP after. I don't think skill at managing my LMG is my problem at all.

Regarding the increased value of Crit from the LMG, for the value of crit, we were going off of how much Chi I generated on Heroic Horridon attempts (granted, for our back-of-the-napkin math that is biased toward my playstyle and this fight only, but I think it's still valid), which includes the chi I generated while LMG was up, and it was still nowhere close to Spirit for mana regen.

[DirewolfX]

Your paladin co-healer was doing less healing than your DK tank. He also wasn't spiking his healing with you when things got rough. And he didn't use ANY of his healing cooldowns (Divine Favor, Guardian of Ancient Kings, Avenging Wrath). Maybe he ran out of mana at the end of the fight there... but that's probably because he used his Divine Plea once in a 10 minute fight (it's a 2 minute cooldown). You're carrying pretty hardcore... Replace paladin, try again.

[Geodew]

Your paladin co-healer was doing less healing than your DK tank. He also wasn't spiking his healing with you when things got rough. And he didn't use ANY of his healing cooldowns (Divine Favor, Guardian of Ancient Kings, Avenging Wrath). Maybe he ran out of mana at the end of the fight there... but that's probably because he used his Divine Plea once in a 10 minute fight (it's a 2 minute cooldown). You're carrying pretty hardcore... Replace paladin, try again.

It's kind of one of those situations where the Paladin is the GM and raid lead. I'll try talking to her. She said she used to rank as Resto Druid in Wrath so maybe she's just got Paladin down wrong. Her LoD over Eternal Flame looks a bit high perhaps, but I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to Paladin, is the problem, so I can't give her any useful advice. Besides "use cds moar."

[iDrunkenheal]

It's kind of one of those situations where the Paladin is the GM and raid lead. I'll try talking to her. She said she used to rank as Resto Druid in Wrath so maybe she's just got Paladin down wrong. Her LoD over Eternal Flame looks a bit high perhaps, but I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to Paladin, is the problem, so I can't give her any useful advice. Besides "use cds moar."

1. She should be rofl stomping all over you in every aspect of this fight.
2. She should be AAing the boss full time to get mana back.
3. She should use divine plea after the first door and everytime after that.
4. divine favor and wings is a huge throughput gain and can conserve mana
5. Guardian is amazing for tank healing.

[Geodew]

New question, regarding Haste breakpoints.

I've seen a bunch of people saying, to paraphrase, "don't go for the high breakpoints if you have to drop a lot of crit to get there."

Besides the obvious mathematical fact that going from 10% crit to 20% crit is not a 10% HPS boost even on average (but it's pretty close), this doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. No matter what your gear status is, you're dropping 3017 crit rating to go from the 6141 ReM breakpoint to the 9158 breakpoint. So, in fact, everyone is dropping exactly the same amount of crit rating regardless of gear quality (but if you have a lot of crit rating already, that crit is doing ever so slightly less for you). Is there... something I'm missing about this?

Also as a mathy person I'd be interested to see the math backing up this claim of whether or not to go for the next breakpoint, if someone has a link to the original post regarding this.

(Off-topic: 5/13H, woo.)

Edit: Found this in main thread

It depends a lot on your raid comp/size, gear level, and whether you have the LMG and Horridon's trinket. (Also, in 2 weeks, the value of the 9158+ breakpoints are going to drop considerably.) A 10man healer will get more benefit out of 9916, just because you tend to do more tank healing in 10s. The general rule of thumb, though, is that when you're way over a breakpoint when you reforge away your haste and can reforge to the next breakpoint without losing too much crit ("too much" being a bit subjective, but 1000-1500 rating seems reasonable to me personally) by switching to haste gems, go for the next breakpoint. But "I must reach the highest breakpoint my gear supports" is not the attitude you should have, it should be more "well, I have nothing else to do with these stat points, I might as well go up a breakpoint." Moving from 6141 to 9158 is like a 3-4% increase in healing done, compared to 5% from an equivalent number of points in crit.

^Does everyone agree with this?

Still want to see the original theorycrafting post if anyone has a link.

[Totaltotemic]

New question, regarding Haste breakpoints.

I've seen a bunch of people saying, to paraphrase, "don't go for the high breakpoints if you have to drop a lot of crit to get there."

Besides the obvious mathematical fact that going from 10% crit to 20% crit is not a 10% HPS boost even on average (but it's pretty close), this doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. No matter what your gear status is, you're dropping 3017 crit rating to go from the 6141 ReM breakpoint to the 9158 breakpoint. So, in fact, everyone is dropping exactly the same amount of crit rating regardless of gear quality (but if you have a lot of crit rating already, that crit is doing ever so slightly less for you). Is there... something I'm missing about this?

How much crit you would drop doesn't have a bearing on whether you would go for the breakpoint because the haste value is so close to crit that it won't ever hurt you in a major way. What matters is how much Int you have to drop (if you have to gem pure haste in more than half of your yellow sockets it's probably not the best idea, depends on a summation of your gear though), which can vary from none (just reforging and haste in yellow sockets) to 1500, and the value of Int itself changes depending on how much Int you already have.

Another problem is that haste only increases some kinds of healing. Uplift, Soothing Mist (if spamming), Revival, the Chi talents, Surging Mist (if used during Soothing), and a few minor things like Expel Harm and Healing Sphere get absolutely no benefit from haste. What makes up the difference is the 50% haste rating increase on SotWS, making that 3k haste actually 4.5k rating which is 10.59% haste. This means that (simplistically assuming 0% crit and 0% haste, but gets the point across) the 3k haste rating is more healing than 3k crit as long as 47.2% or more of the healing benefits from haste. On a typical fight Renewing Mist alone is 25+%, SCK (or Enveloping on 10 man) is usually another 5-10%, Gift of the Serpent is affected by haste in that more heals = more orbs, so you approach the limit where haste takes over fairly quickly.

To use a real randomly selected log from Megaera (I believe the worst haste fight as it is very CT/Uplift/Revival dominated):

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ov...?s=6189&e=6547

21% ReM
10.6% GotS
3.9% SCK
3.6% EM
2.6% Chalice proc

Totals 41.7%, which means that the Monk in this log would probably have been better served going crit for this fight, but it's not a major difference (we're talking 1-2% difference in total healing)


Of course ReM and SCK have drastically higher representations in 25 man, making it almost never a question there.

The other thing to consider is that this is strictly speaking from a 3k crit vs 3k haste point of view, when realistically it's more like 2k crit, 1k Spirit (can't reforge to Crit on a spirit/crit item), which would push haste over the edge a lot.

[Geodew]

Right well keep in mind I'm not dropping all my Spirit for progression except on Heroic Ji-kun so far, so in my case it would be dropping 3k crit. You didn't mention this: Keep in mind that 10% haste is also +10% RPPM, so if LMG is worth 6k Spirit I essentially can drop ~600 more spirit for crit and have the same regen. I also don't have HLG trinket, only LMG, so I'm thinking about dropping back down to 6145 unless I get it, but with LMG so strong I'm not really sure.

My armory again for reference: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...louth/advanced

Also keep in mind for me that my gems are pretty fluid. Since MW has 1 int ~= 2 crit or so, and with gems I can precisely hit my Haste cap and reforge anywhere from 8.5-13.5k Spirit depending on the fight, it doesn't really matter what I gem that much as long as it's int, crit, haste, or spirit.

Edit: I use these stat weights for AMR gems (to make sure I can hit 13k Spirit when I want to) and then reforge down my Spirit using ReforgeLite to whatever I need. https://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/...a-64b9ae524ab4